This morning I got up at 4:00AM to meet up with 4 other educators to catch a taxi to the Tsukiji Fish Market. I lived on the Gulf Coast as a child but never have seen such a thing. It was time!
The taxi dropped us off several blocks from the market, and in Tokyo, which is densely packed, that means you will never find it without asking people where it is. The people in this area must be accustomed to english speakers asking for directions to the market as they all smiled graciously and pointed us in the direction to walk.
It was still dark, and I have never seen so many people working so hard. The entire market area is enormous: blocks and blocks of wall to wall shops all jammed in together. Small, odd shaped little gas-powered carts (pictured) speeding about everywhere. I was a bit worried we would be run over. The area is extremely congested.
As we got closer and closer to the market, we saw metal trays and styrofoam containers stacked to the ceilings, all full of seafood. Many times open containers of ice had exotic fish packed in them for display to sell. The smell of seafood was mixed with the dense smell of the little odd-shaped gas powered vehicles: much the same smell of the oily exhaust from a lawnmower. The activity seemed like chaos to my untrained eye, but I am certain that everything was highly choreographed and organized.
Finally we arrived at a door the said both in Japanese and English: "Visitor Passage Entrance." When we walked in I saw hundreds of enormous frozen tuna, which had been weighed when they were brought into the warehouse off of the boats, being lined up on the wet floor. The fish handlers seemed to line then up by size and weight. Each fish had a sticker attached to it indicating how much it weighed.
The large tuna had all been de-gilled, de-tailed, gutted, and frozen on the ship when caught. When the frozen fish were first brought in, the floor in this large warehouse had "smoke" like that from dry ice hovering over it. The room was cold from the frozen fish. Inspectors went about determining the quality of the fish meat by cutting around the tail.
The auction began at 5:30AM with auctioneers sort of singing and dancing up and down to get the highest price for their fish while their customers quietly raised their thumbs to purchase. The auctioneers are the men facing the people who were bidding on the fish. The auctioneer in the center of the picture got into it the most. The whole selling process went very fast, less than five minutes.
We also walked down several blocks further to see the live fish section. Amazing! Live, squiggling eels were scooped up in large nets and placed on a huge wooden trough. The fish monger then grabbed them and threw them into large vats to sort them by size. The eels were not happy!
I've never really seen anything quit like this before. One of the guys from our group had arrived at 3:30AM. He told us that one of the fish monger driving one of the strange little buggies showed him how to drive the bizarre contraption and let him drive a tuna from the boat to the warehouse! Amazingly, we were later told than Japan eats more seafood than any other nation in the world. All of the fish we had seen today would be eaten today in the Japanese restaurants!
Moral of the story, "If you are a fish, stay away from the waters near Japan!"
Technorati Tags: JFMF10.06
